It didn't bother me to turn 30, 40 or 50, but I think 60 is the birthday that's finally going to make me start feeling old.

Maybe it's all the reminders of advancing age that have been rushing at me lately like the New York Giants' defensive line.

My baby sister, Marilyn, turned 55 this weekend and it was unfathomable to imagine the incredibly cute little girl who was always underfoot qualifying for senior housing.

The 1966 Hilo High reunion committee is planning a big birthday party to observe that we're all turning 60 this year — at least the ones that got this far. Too many didn't.

Some colleagues with whom I was hired as part of a big expansion of Gannett News Service in Washington in 1978 are talking about a reunion in October. Could that have really been 30 years ago? I was barely 10 years out of high school and just hitting my professional stride.

Perhaps it was AARP that got to me. I've sneered at the membership cards the retiree group has sent me for years, but I had to take a long look in the mirror when I used one for the first time recently to get a hotel discount.

PBS had a special Sunday on Bob Dylan's breakthrough appearances at the Newport Folk Festival between 1963 and 1965, when he gave folk music a topical edge and then took it electric with rock and roll that actually said something.

I've had mixed feelings about the sometimes boorish Dylan over the years, but he was an energizing voice during those turbulent times that aroused my social consciousness, changed my view of authority and shaped the person I would become.

But I didn't dwell on those things as I watched the PBS show; I was struck by how young Dylan looked compared to the grizzled old rock icon we see today.

He had such a soft face incapable of growing the facial hair popular among protest musicians of the day, taking me back to my own tortuous wait for the whiskers to come in so I could effect a proper street image of pained alienation.

Dylan's fellow folkie and one-time love interest Joan Baez was asked on a different program what impressed her when she saw that old footage of the two of them together.

"Baby fat," she said. And so much innocent idealism.

When family and friends reach the Big 5-0, I enjoy passing on something my former colleague George Steele told me: The best thing about turning 50 is you don't have to worry about dying young anymore.

I'd love to hear what George had to say about turning 60, but sadly he didn't make it that far.

Age, like anything else, is a matter of perspective.

I took some grief on my blog a couple of weeks ago when I criticized a move in the Legislature to lift mandatory retirement for judges — not because I favor age discrimination, but because the bill in its form then was a political ploy to prevent a Republican governor from replacing a Democrat-appointed chief justice.

One of my critics made it personal by asking, "What's the appropriate age limit for over-the-hill ex-editors with blogs?"

If he meant to sting, it had the opposite effect, making me realize that the thing about being over the hill is the only way to get there is to make it to the top of the hill in the first place.

It's a pretty satisfying view from up there that not everybody gets to see.

David Shapiro, a veteran Hawai'i journalist, can be reached by e-mail at dave@volcanicash.net. His columns are archived at www.volcanicash.net. Read his daily blog at blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com.